Re: What do the ontologists want

On Thu, 17 May 2001, Dan Connolly wrote:
[...]
> But that sounds an awful lot like what folks were saying
> about global hypertext in 1991.

Sorry Dan, but I just don't buy into this "we showed them then, we'll show
them again" bravado, which is also evident in the recent (otherwise very
useful) Scientific American piece:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-lee.html [[
	[...]
	Knowledge representation, as this technology
	 is often called, is currently in a state
	comparable to that of hypertext before the advent of the Web: it is
	clearly a good idea, and some very nice demonstrations
	exist, but it has not yet changed the world.
	]]

The history of embedding machine-processable references in
electronic documents (hypertext) is short, interesting, and really
very different to the long and well documented history of knowledge
representation. Go read http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/categories.html
and tell me that the year 2001 is to KR as the year 1989 was to
electronic hypertext.

OK, so the WWW successfully strips down some ideas floating in around
in the hypertext community, and successfully applied them on the Internet.
We all gained a lot from this. But I see no reason whatsoever for this to
bolster out confidence that the same trick can be played with KR. It's an
entirely  different kettle of fish... What next? WWW-Physics,
WWW-Chemistry, where we apply our "simplify it so it scales" methodology
to some other disciplines previously bedevilled by unnecessary complexity?
What makes WWW-Logic special?

We need to treat a complex and ancient field with the respect it deserves;
to draw an analogy between KR and the (really very handy) ability to shove
hyperlinks in structured textfiles is just crass.

Dan

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Received on Thursday, 17 May 2001 10:51:49 UTC